With recent improvements in search technology. you may wonder: “Isn’t it easier to just type something into Yahoo and Google?” Well, I myself hardly spend much time on directories searching for information. So, Isn’t it really a waste of time to build directories?

Unlike in the past, directories today serve a different purpose. They are hardly meant for information searching. Instead, directories serve as validation sites for search engines today. Websites included in reputable directories are often ranked higher in search engines.

This essentially means that if your site is accepted by www.abc-directory.com, abc-directory thinks that your site is worth a visit by search engines, and hence should deserve higher ranking in search engines. (For example: you may type “Singapore directory” in MSN. Do you find us on the 6th position?). For newbie internet surfers, this is what I meant by search engine ranking - ranked top in search engines for keywords that you intend users to find your site.

How will directories help your site in search engine ranking?

-Associate and Increase relevancy of your site with certain keywords
Search engines are robots crawling the web, and see all websites as a vastly interconnected "spider web". Directories are organized in categories recognized by popular keywords (eg. Education, business). This helps search engines to determine which categories should a website falls under, and the theme of keywords that it should be related to.

- Directories serve as Expert documents for search engines
Besides bringing relevant search results, search engines want to deliver good quality websites to internet users. Importance of websites is determined by the top down organization structure of directories. Hence, directories with certain quality control and good hierarchy ranking structure helps to determine whether a site is worth visiting. Let us take a look at Google’s Page rank technology: Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B”

- Protection from spammers
There are millions of spammers on the web constantly trying to manipulate search engine result to boost their sites' ranking in search engines. Search engine search the web and index pages using web robots (or commonly called “spiders”), with the shortfall of not having human eyes of directory editors. This can be dangerous when spammers try to cheat the robots. However, spammers are not able to get through the human eyes of directory editors. One or two directory editors may accept a site, but Google may analyze the links from as many as few hundred directories pointing to a site.

Will search engines treat all directories with same respect?

Certainly NOT. Directories are built by human editors, and there are certain downsides.

a) Directory listing can be outdated very fast
Building a good directory requires effort and time. Often, website listing found in many directories are not updated, and broken links can be found in many directories. This is especially so when websites today are updated more frequently. It is indeed time consuming to maintain a directory with more than few thousand links. Directories that are more accurate with their listing is definitely more welcomed by search engines.

b) We also come to a question of fairness here
If editors themselves own affiliate sites, isn't it possible that they manipulate their own directory listing and prevent certain listing of competitive sites. Well, search engines are not stupid. They accumulate analysis from many other directories to determine proper ranking for a website.

Feel free to visit article: Directory submission tips for further reading.